Flexible Image Transport System
General description
FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) is a heavily-used and well-standardised format for storing astronomical data. It can store both images and tables, and has basic but flexible support for metadata.
The format is fundamentally rather simple; indeed it is simple enough that a basic reader can be constructed with a relatively small amount of effort, but this is rarely necessary, since there are readers and writers for a broad range of scientific programming languages.
The metadata is stored as a list of key-value pairs, with the keys being up to eight characters long, and the values up to 70 characters. There are some standards, and several conventions, for the choices of keyword. These conventions generally interoperate well, but readers should be aware that collisions are possible.
The format has been standardised in a sequence of papers in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, and a set of conventions for header metadata has been developed, over a number of years.
PSRFITS is a particular variety of FITS for storing pulsar data, as used, for instance, in the SETI@Home project to analyze such data for possible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Other information
The format is summarised in Wikipedia, which includes some history of the format.
For further information, see:
- Version 3 of FITS is described in [1]
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